The present invention may be useful in any situation where there is a desire to monitor the phone and computer use of one computer station with voice capabilities or just the voice/phone or just the computer and computer monitor from another computer station. In the case of business applications, this invention may be used in the business services activities of telephone surveys, credit cards agents or representative activities, technical support functions, and any other agent services business which might use telephones and related computers to conduct business over the phone. The employees who use such a system are generally referred to as agents and they are provided with computer workstations which are voice capable, by way example phones and computers which are functionally tied together, and connected to a network which is interconnected to a server computer and other computer workstations which are voice capable. These agent are generally in a group which may or may not be physically located together, but in either event there will be a group of a few to hundreds of agents. In these cases the agents interface with a “customer” over the phone and use the computers and monitors at their workstations to provide, receive and enter or discuss information related to the company's customers.
As part of this interactive business process, companies want to provide means of monitoring the activities of the agents at their computer workstations and the telephones that would give a complete picture of the agent's performance and interaction with the customer. Further, a company may need a complete picture of the agent's performance to be used as a teaching tool for increasing the efficiency of the agent and obtaining a better result for the company. Also, a company may want to protect itself and the agent from a customer's false claim. In order to monitor these agents, companies set up supervisors with another computer with voice capabilities which may be tied into the network for connection to the agents computer workstation and telephone. As the number of agents and computer workstations grow, the ability to monitor each agent becomes more difficult in both time available for the supervisor and the computing load required to bring the screen changes from the agent's computer screen or monitor to the supervisor's computer and monitor in real time. As the supervisor's time get short with the increase of the agents being monitored, it becomes more difficult to evaluate an agent and create an overall evaluation of a particular agent that is consistent with the preselected categories or criteria that a company may choose for its evaluation of the agents.
The prior art telephone call monitoring systems tied to computer systems have tried various means to achieve successful results with limited success. Some of the prior art systems have used triggers or business events to activate recording functions of the voice and computer activity or connect a supervisor by voice or by voice and a simultaneous screen copy display of the agents screen and his activity. In some prior art systems, they have used random time checks to monitor agents screens and voice communications. In others, they have used special times of the day or intervals of time to periodically check agents and see how they were doing. Still others have used voice sensors which track the speed and volume of an agent's or customer's voice to trigger event monitoring because these events might indicate a problem with an agent or customer. However, in all this type prior art, if the volume of activity increased the processing and storage load also increased, the supervisor could not follow all the activities. This slow down on the computer systems therefore was too much activity and the supervisor lost the ability to follow in real time. In many of these cases, the prior art had to further employ a recording system and then analyze the recorded event at a later time. Reviewing the recorded event at a later time results in a loss of efficiency and is time consuming.
To solve the computational loading problems, some of the prior art attempted to compare the screens of the agent's computer workstation monitor after taking an initial “shot” of the screen and then doing a screen comparison to the first screen shot to determine the changes and if changes occurred the full screen was delivered to the supervisor's computer and monitor to allow him to follow the activity of the agent on his screen. While such a prior art approach may have worked for one agent and one supervisor, such a system becomes overloaded with computational workload that it is difficult to keep up in real time when there are many agents and supervisors. The constant comparing of full screens, looking for changes and then sending the full screen with the change can quickly overload the system and degrade the ability for the agents computer workstation to be kept simultaneously current on the supervisor's computer monitor. As time delayed responses begin to occur, the supervisor is unable to keep up with the live activity. Even when the system comprises only one agent and one supervisor, the delay time could be significant if there was a lot of activity at the computer workstations and monitor of the agent.
Other prior art attempted to provide simultaneous monitoring of computer workstations with the supervisor's computer and monitor by trying to broadly define the screen changes by monitoring broad screen change regions in which only part of the region changed. This concept sought to reduce the amount of data requiring comparison and determined to be different and in need of transmission and therefore would reduce the computational load on the computer systems. One piece of prior art attempted to reduce the amount of screen data to be transmitted by the use of a pair of coordinates that grow to encompass all the changed regions between pollings from the monitored computer to the updated computer screen of the supervisor computer and monitor. This prior art system even used a storage and comparison function between polling for the screen changes to reduce the load on the system; however it still transferred too much data to the monitoring computer from the agents monitored computer. This prior art used intercepts of graphic primitive functions to the display driver to determine if regions changed and expanding the coordinate pairs to encompass those regions. Further, this prior art used the graphic primitives which were passed to the display driver and missed or left out system messages which were passed to window registered with the operating system, thereby leaving some activity of the agents at their computer workstations not able to be transmitted to the supervisor's computer and monitor for monitoring.
The prior art used many approaches to tie the voice and computer screen or monitor change together. It attempted to record the voice and index it to video or digital recording of the events on the agents computer and monitor and allow play back. The problem with that is that play back functionality requires additional time and does not allow a supervisor to intervene at the time of the activity and prevents simultaneous evaluation of the agent in real time or near the occurrence of the events.
Much of the prior art provide means, which while inefficient to record and monitor the agents computer workstation, did not provide for evaluation of the agent on the supervisor's computer and computer monitor. This failure prevented evaluation and rating of the agents simultaneously with the activities upon which they were being rated. In some of the prior art, the supervisor would have to review a recorded phone and computer screen version and then rate the agents for the company based on the predetermined criteria. This was not very efficient.